Journal article · Preprint article
Towards optimal single-photon sources from polarized microcavities
An optimal single-photon source should deterministically deliver one and only one photon at a time, with no trade-off between the source’s efficiency and the photon indistinguishability. However, all reported solid-state sources of indistinguishable single photons had to rely on polarization filtering which reduced the efficiency by 50%, which fundamentally limited the scaling of photonic quantum technologies.
Here, we overcome this final long-standing challenge by coherently driving quantum dots deterministically coupled to polarization-selective Purcell microcavities—two examples are narrowband, elliptical micropillars and broadband, elliptical Bragg gratings. A polarization-orthogonal excitation-collection scheme is designed to minimize the polarization-filtering loss under resonant excitation.
We demonstrate a polarized single-photon efficiency of 0.60±0.02 (0.56±0.02), a single-photon purity of 0.975±0.005 (0.991±0.003), and an indistinguishability of 0.975±0.006 (0.951± 0.005) for the micropillar (Bragg grating) device. Our work provides promising solutions for truly optimal single-photon sources combining near-unity indistinguishability and near-unity system efficiency simultaneously.
Language: | English |
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Year: | 2019 |
Pages: | 770-775 |
ISSN: | 17494893 and 17494885 |
Types: | Journal article and Preprint article |
DOI: | 10.1038/s41566-019-0494-3 |
ORCIDs: | 0000-0003-1211-1771 , 0000-0002-5158-5091 , 0000-0002-7765-5553 , Gregersen, Niels , 0000-0002-0310-3078 , 0000-0002-8227-9177 and 0000-0002-6100-5142 |